Computers to mimic brain

WASHINGTON: IBM has announced it will lead a US government-funded collaboration to make electronic circuits that mimic brains. IBM has been awarded $4.9 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for the first phase of DARPA’s Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) initiative.

IBM, with Stanford University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell University, Columbia University Medical Centre, and University of California-Merced have announced plans to create computing systems that simulate and emulate the brain’s abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition while rivaling its low power consumption and compact size.

“Exploratory research is in the fabric of IBM’s DNA,” said Josephine Cheng, an IBM fellow and vice president of IBM’s Almaden Research Centre in California. “We believe that our cognitive-computing initiative will help shape the future of computing in a significant way, bringing to bear new technologies that we haven’t even begun to imagine.”

IBM said a cognitive computer, acting as a ‘global brain’, could quickly and accurately put together the disparate pieces of these complex puzzles and help people make good decisions rapidly.

By seeking inspiration from the structure, dynamics, function and behaviour of the brain, the IBM-led research team aims to break the conventional programmable-machine paradigm. As IBM sees it, this technology stands to bring entirely new computing
architectures and programming paradigms.